SEAWATER MYSTERIES

Dominion, Volume 26, Issue 124, 18 February 1933, Page 4

SEAWATER MYSTERIES

Life-giving 1 Element

UNKNOWN TO SCIENTISTS

(Reuter—Letter to “The Dominion.”) One of the principal attractions at the Zoo is the aquarium, and Mr. Boulenger, the Zoo expert, has just been revealing some of its secrets. The sea-water used in the aquarium comes from the Bay of Biscay. Homecoining ships take it in as ballast, and discharge it at Tilbury into carriers that bring it up the Thames to near Westminster. These in turn transfer it into motor water-tanks in which it is brought up the Regent’s Canal to the Zoo.

Two hundred thousand gallons of seawater are stored in an underground reservoir In Regent’s Park. As it is needed it is pumped to another reservoir high up on the Mappin Terraces, on which the goats and bears disport themselves, and thence flows down to the’aquarium underneath. The sea-water could be made artificially, but it would cost more than the cost of transport from the Bay of Biscay? The artificial sea-water also has the disadvantage that fish placed in it always go blind and eventually die. The addition of only two per cent, of real sea-water to artificial seawater corrects this trouble. It proves, according to Mr. Boulenger, that in seawater there is some mysterious element indispensable to health which no chemist has up to the present been able to analyse.